Fear and Self-Loathing in Waterford

I am going through a period of self-loathing at the moment. It's hard to watch friendships that were nurtured for years crumble because of distance. A friend of mine in Cali called me a few days ago. Her fiancee had left her, and apparently everyone saw this coming but her. Where a good friend would have sat and felt her pain and cried with her, I spent over an hour resisting the urge to tell her to spare her long distance bill and call someone who cares. Just two days later, another friend called to tell me her husband wants a divorce. I had to fight the very same urge. For the same reasons. No one thought these relationships would work. All the odds said no. In both cases, both parties and been unfaithful, and lied, and lets face it, 15 is entirely too young to know who it is you will spend your life with. If I had settled down with the man I was with at fifteen, I would be miserable now. To compound my feeling that I am emotionally betraying these girls who made up so much of my high school years, after a long conversation with my niece I discovered that she is almost exactly the same person I was at her age. This worries me because I know exactly what kind of person I was in the year that followed. She is better than that. I feel bad because I was always around her then, I was her influence, and now that she's making the same mistakes that I did, I can't help but think that this is my fault. I'm sure her father would agree, but he's blamed every imperfection in her personality on me since she was a baby. it's my fault she's mouthy, it's my fault she curses, it's my fault she tends to be a bit bitchy (that is Seanspeak for outspoken) But from what she tells me it isn't just my influence, but her father as well. She is developing the same kind of issues I had (have) Sean has a new toy, and doesn't pay as much attention to her as he should. But I know what daddy issues lead to too. This doesnt look good, and from half a continent away, I don't know what I can do.